Where South Carolina meets the south of France

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Tag #french

On my list of ultimate comfort foods French onion soup is preeeeetty high up. Every time I see it on a menu I have to get it. If it were possible to be a French onion soup sommelier you could expect to see a blue checkmark next to my name.

While time consuming, making a good broth is simple enough, so to step my game up I went to the most often overlooked part of the preparation, the bread. While a baguette does a marvelous job of soaking up the soup I thought homemade garlic bread croutons would be the perfect opportunity to inject a little more flavor into the soup. And between the gruyere on top, the sweet and savory onion soup, and buttery garlic bread the soup almost has a, and bear with me here, juicy mouthfeel. Yes I’m aware soup is liquid and so is juice, and yes I used the term mouthfeel. It’s just so many things bursting at once you can’t help but want more.

When flipping through chef crush of mine, Hugh Acheson’s, The Chef and the Slow Cooker one page made me stop in my tracks. The recipe for confit tomatoes. The term confit as it applies to meat means to slowly cook an item in its own fat. For vegetables the term has come to mean very slowly poaching in massive amounts of olive oil with aromatics. Either way the end result is delicious.

When I first started this blog back in 2014 there was one dish in mind that summed up everything the concept of the fancy redneck was about. That dish was taking a culinary icon of South Carolina, pulled pork with mustard sauce, and marrying it with the aromatics of southern France. This is that dish. The dish that I built the dream of my food writing career on.

This is a dish I have been playing around with the idea of for a long time. As someone who is all about finding ways to add a twist to comfort food I knew the day would come that I have to tackle chicken pot pie. But how?

For the last few months while I have been on hiatus I have forced myself to do something completely shocking, something I never thought I could or would do. And that thing was teaching myself how to cook and eat on a (mostly) vegetarian and vegan diet. I get in real life that that is not nearly dramatic as I made it sound, but to put it in perspective I have had other bloggers describe my blog as “specialty in non-vegetarian food” when nominating me for awards, so I would say my recent dip into vegetable life is worth noting.